sure you can do it with linux on a powerbook, with an xp machine, or with a little mini-itx setup, but i figured an ancient 7mhz machine wouldn’t be nearly fast enough to be suitable for an auto mp3 player.
i figured wrong.
here’s a nice retro hack that brings together an amiga 600 and an opel astra. for extra style points, there is a video of the project’s creator playing lotus 3 while driving down the street. those amiga fans can do just about anything.
Ok, uh… first of all – you can get MP3 dash car players for cheap. Next – you didn’t really hack it into your car – you just plugged a screen to it and wired it to your casette player.
Finally, it would have been cheaper just to buy a MP3 player and a car adapter – for half that price – and it would have probably would have worked – and looked alot better.
Cheers!
You’d be surprised what those things were capable of. The magic was not in the CPU speed but in the machine’s architecture.
I really want to know what audio format he’s using. I have almost 4 gb of music, and it totals about 55 hours, not the 222 that he seems to expect.
yes it is expensive for an mp3 player but the cool factor more then makes up for that i wish i and one
He used an Amiga AND a Trackball. Yuk! I think he needs to jump forward a few decades.
thought you guys might like this also. Its a macintosh in a pathfinder – pathintosh. Its quite nice how he integrated the touchscreen lcd into the dash with a custom fiberglass mold. Also, he got the controls on the steering wheel to integrate.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021204071825/www.mp3car.com/usersites/Destin/Pictures001.html
by the way, i think the point was not that you COULD do it with a mp3 head unit, everyone knows that, but that its possible with an amiga.
like the ipod shuffle array. you COULD just get a normal HDD and stick that in your PC. but that’s not what hackaday is about, is it?
“I really want to know what audio format he’s using. I have almost 4 gb of music, and it totals about 55 hours, not the 222 that he seems to expect.”
From the site:
“Thats why I resample my MP3’s down to 96 kBit, 44 kHz. You can’t hear the difference, but now I can save up to 16.5 hours of music to one CD and 222 hours on my harddisk!”
Kind of eww at that quality for regular MP3, even in a noisy car. IMO, anyway. MP3Pro or WMA at that bitrate is pretty good though.
Neat hack, this is the first Amiga I’ve seen crammed into a car (which is odd, since he’s done it before).
Hey Leo! Thanks for posting that “Pathintosh” link. I have the same model of that Nissan Pathfinder. That link just inspired me to do a similar mod for my car.
Hey Leo! Thanks for posting that “Pathintosh” link. I have the same model of that Nissan Pathfinder. That link just inspired me to do a similar mod for my car.
You Amiga haters might not realise, but he’s totally recased the Amiga into an Amstrad satellite receiver + added a few modifications to allow the use of PC keyboards and trackballs.
And about him having to jump forward a few decades.. Why? It’s not taking anything away from YOU if someone else likes classic computers and can be creative about using them. You are the loser, not him!
The last time I tried to play an mp3 on an Amiga I was using an A1200 with a 40Mhz 68030 and had a mono mp3 (almost a decade ago – i don’t remember the bitrate). The decoder couldn’t keep up. Current generations of Amiga mp3 decoder code have obviously increased their efficiency by orders of magnitude if he can play mp3s on a 7Mhz 68k.
Heh. That one, as I recall, uses an external MP3 player chip in a purpose-built device connected to, and getting its power from, the parallel port. Now remember that this ain’t your daddy’s PC parallel port — even the Amiga 500 (of which the A600 is a smaller variant with a slightly updated chipset) could do about 40 kilobytes per second upstream. There was even a special cable you could solder together to network two Amigas. Surprise surprise, a 320 kbit MP3 needs just a little bit under 40kb/s to transfer — meaning that the solution is prolly restricted to 256 kbit/s. Still, the entertainment possibilities alone…
The thing to remember is that many of the Amiga guys used to be C64 guys. Many old-school bedroom-style hardware hackers started out on those things.
Where is admin?!
Thanks